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Sumeth Damrongchaitham, president and CEO of Thai Airways International (THAI), said the airline is only reducing the salaries of top executives, not operation officers.

After a THAI board meeting on August 19, it was reported that many top executives agreed willingly to reduce their salaries in order to ease the burden on the airline.

“Lower cost measures will help Thai Airways compete in the airline business. Many board members and top executives have shown their compassion and agreed to help the organisation during this time of crisis. Officials at the operational level do not need to worry, because this measure only aims to lower the cost of management without any effect on the quality of service,” Sumeth said.

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Better proposal - cut the entire middle and upper management for obvious inability to get the job done.
Outsource (like Sony did with their CEO) what you cannot do at least as good yourself.
Will take time but ultimately to the benefit of TG, the owners (Thai government = Thai people), customers and honest staff alike ........

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Publicly traded company with the state (the citizens) as majority shareholders. Would be nice to see the numbers

...how much down to how much, and how many execs?

Well I guess it's a gesture but IMHO it shows total lack of managerial capability. Even if it's say 100 to 200 execs and their salaries are reduced by say 25%, in total this makes no dent at all into their overall billion Baht losses and their operating costs.

I wonder where the idea came from? Was it sumeth? Is this the best he can offer?

If sumeth wants to focus on salary costs, how about a total, nothing sacred, test of every job: whether it's actually needed, how many jobs are on the org. chart and occupied which have little workload? How many manager positions exist and are occupied and have no managerial duties and have no reporting staff but the occupant receives a managerial / executive level salary.

I wonder how many Thai citizens know that Thai flight crew and cabin crew are paid salary and allowances at the same level as equivalaent positions in Singapore Airlines? Why is this so? Perhaps 15 years back these 2 groups of employees complained that they were highly embarrassed to have to walk past S'pore, Ctahay etc., staff at airports because these guys woud know that Thai staff were lowly paid. When it came up there salaries were instantly raised to be equivalent to S'pore Airlines staff.

And how many Thai citizens know that Thai pays the tax deductions for these staff. Start with their salary, calculate the personal tax on that amount and Tai pays the tax for the staff. In other words there is no actual / real tax deduction from their salaries.

And it would be nice to see a real and detailed comparison of operating costs Thai against 2 or 3 other airlines which fly a similar pattern and frequency of routes. What's your guess, would the Thai operating costs be similar to other similar route / frequency of operations?

And of course not forgetting the massive costs of freeby flights.

When I woked for an oil giant it was recognized that the cost of support services was way way too high, this prompted preparation of a serious audited list of all support service payments for the previous 12 months, and a question was asked 'was this expenditure needed to achieve business goals?' Many contractw ere cancelled and regularl but non-contract items were banned and more, cost savings in the hundreds of thousands of milllions of pounds. It would be interesting to see an audit something like this applied to Thai.